The Yellow sofa by Eça de Queirós

Portuguese fiction

Original title – Alves & C.a

Translator – John Vetch

Source – Personal copy

As you all know, or if you don’t, two of my favourite weeks of the blogging year are Simon and Karen’s year club, and this is the tenth year of them running it, and most, if not all, of them I have taken part in, so as soon as the year was mentioned, which is 1925, 100 years ago. I looked at the list of books. I pick books that may have come out in 1925 in their original language most of the time. I saw this on the list of possible books. I had to take a double glance as I knew Eça de Queirós was a Victorian age Portuguese writer. He is one of those writers I have been meaning to get to for a few years, so this slim novella is maybe the perfect into. It has a different title in the US and the UK. I had missed this, and I ordered the US book. He is considered to be one of the leading writers in Europe from his generation. I am pleased that 1925 club finally gave me the push to read this writer.

ON THAT FATEFUL DAY, GODOFREDO DA CONCEI-çao Alves, stifled by the heat and out of breath through rushing from Black Horse Square, pushed open the green baize door of his office in Gilders Street, precisely when the wall clockover the bookkeeper’s desk wasstrikingtwo, in that deep tone to which the low entrance ceiling imparted a mournful sonority. He paused, checked his own watch, hanging on a horsehair fob on his white waistcoat, and he did not conceal a gesture ofannoyance at having had his morning wasted at the offices of the Ministry of Marine. It was always the same whenever his overseas commission business took him there. Despite the Director-General’s being a cousin of his, andalthough he had regularly slipped a silvercoin into the hand of the commissionaire, and had discounted letters of credit for two minor officials, there was always the same boring wait to see the Minister, endlessturning over of papers, hold-ups, delays, all the irregular creaking and disjointed working of an old machine, half falling to pieces.

The start of the day and its events that changed his future

The book follows Godofredo Alves, a businessman, the Alves of Alves and CO. The Co is his business partner, Machado, and his friend. This man is a lover and seems to his friend Godofredo a sort of wild lover. SO when he goes into their office one day and he finds his partner not there, Godofredo thinks of Machado having a liaison with one of his lovers. At this point Godofredo remembers that it is his wedding anniversary and decides to go grab a gift and surprise his wife whilst his friend is off again having a lover. SSO when he arrives home and finds his wife, Ludovina, sitting on their yellow sofa of the title of the book. She is in the arms of his business partner. The rest of the book follows the aftermath of this event in a time when honour means the world, and men still had duels!! What will he do? How will it all end?

Hearing her there, he turned, peeped in… And what he saw-good God!-left him petrified, breathless. The blood rushed to his head and so sharp was the pain at his heart that it almost threw him to the ground. On the yellow damask sofa, fronting a little table on which there stood a bottle of port, Lulu in a white negligee, was leaning in abandon on the shoulder of a man whose arm was around her waist, and smiling as she gazed languorously at him.

The man was Machado!

When he finds his friend and buisness partner with his wife!!

This is a book of manners, really a book of its time. It seems from what i have read that adultery, especially female adultery, is a recurring theme in several books by Queiros. The scenes of the events after the discovery of his wife in the arms of his friend and business partner. See a man struggle to control those around him after he banishes his wife back to her family, as he struggles to get the domestic staff to look after him like they did when his wife was there. This is a sort of upstairs-downstairs mixed with PG Wodehouse. It has humour, class, manners, honour lost, and honour all in i slim work that seems a lot more than its mere hundred and so pages when i read it. I enjoyed this as an intro to Queiros, for whom I know there are nine other books available on the Dedalus Books website. To read, including the Maias, his most famous book. So an interesting book for the first book of 1925, a book that came out 25 years after the writer had died. Found by his son. Have you read any of his books?